


we've always been up against it

by fairmanor



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Developing Relationship, Fluff, Intimacy, Let Ian and Mickey be KIDS goddamnit, M/M, Minor Internalized Homophobia, Season 2 Fill-In, Summer, hand-holding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:49:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27676295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairmanor/pseuds/fairmanor
Summary: There’s nothing about their relationship that’s strictly wholesome. Mickey knows that. It had been fucked from the start, literally. But there’s something here, something that lives deep in the veins of the ground where he and Ian walk, that makes Mickey feel like someone who’s meant to be seventeen years old. But with Ian, Mickey can feel the childhood he lost creeping back in like the dawn of every longer day.The first winter that Mickey spent with Ian, he let himself love. By the time summer came around, he learned how to let himself be loved in return.
Relationships: Ian Gallagher/Mickey Milkovich
Comments: 7
Kudos: 94





	we've always been up against it

**Author's Note:**

> \- Hello! This is my first Shameless fic. I hope you like.
> 
> \- Apologies for any timing inconsistencies and whatever! I've only watched the show once through and that was very recently so I'm not fully acquainted with the ins and outs of it lol (however from what I know, the timeline is a mystery anyway so I guess you can just suspend your disbelief for now).
> 
> \- This fic was inspired by a Villagers song, and if you haven't listened to them then you should because they have STRONG early seasons Ian & Mickey vibes. (yes, there is an egregious use of song lyrics in this and no I don't care.)

Somewhere, deep in the hidden parts of him that whisper truths at night, Mickey knows that this shouldn’t be hard work.

He might have grown up in a shell of fear, his own household raining down like acid on him whenever it wanted, but he’s seen it before. He’s seen what it is to want, and to be wanted in return. He’s seen what it is to care. He’s watched dramatic reunions on TV, seen celebrity weddings in his sister’s magazines. He remembers the way his mother, on the rarest of rare days, would cut up some fruit and hand it to him as he ran his blue crayon through the grooves of the kitchen table.

Love, in all its variations, isn’t a foreign concept to Mickey. It’s just one he can’t unlock for himself. He can watch the screens and read the stories and think about his mother’s good days all he likes, but at the end of the day it’s akin to being back in kindergarten when he would sit on the sides of the playground and watch the other kids play. It’s not that they said he wasn’t allowed to play with them, but he just _knew_.

It’s like when the heating got shut off at home when Mickey was five. _But why?_ He’d kept asking Iggy, tugging on his older brother’s sleeve. They’d all crowded into Mickey’s room for the night because it had the thickest walls and seemed to lock in a smidgeon more heat than the other rooms in their cellblock of a house.

Iggy kept pushing him off, probably unable to bring himself to answer, until he snapped and turned around.

_Jesus, Mickey! Because you can’t have everything, you know! Not everyone can have every fuckin’ thing in the world!_

He had shut up about the heating after that. And about every other thing the world snatched out his hands, cruel and biting. The day his mother left, the same day that the power was out and he couldn’t switch on the TV, Mickey boxed up the idea of love and put it neatly into the category of things unavailable to him.

He knows that this, sitting here with Ian, should come easily. He spent last winter staring at himself in the mirror after coming home from the Kash and Grab, letting simple truths scream in his head even if he was too afraid to say them out loud. _You love him. You love him._

He’s spent so long accompanied by the thought of Ian now that he knows it should be second nature to reach out, to sit and talk about all the shit going on in their lives, to do something other than roll around in the freezer at the store. Mickey knows what love looks like, can recognise it in himself, but has no reason to believe it will ever come back to him.

Anyway, he’s got good at pretending now. Pretending he doesn’t care by leaving Ian’s texts on read or skipping shifts at work, never mind that he’s itching to go. But eventually, needs must. If he gets _too_ good at pretending, the pretending will get him good, and he’ll lose the only person in his life that knows who he is. So sometimes, after their shifts at work or their sex, Mickey will tag along when Ian has a smoke under the bridge or hangs around at the nearby playground. He’ll lean against the gates as the sun sets, all warmth and orange and _summer_ , and watch Ian set himself a makeshift obstacle course in a pair of boots that gets heavier every day.

Mickey manages to tear his eyes away from the sight of Ian for a second to look down at his own sneakers, scuffing on the asphalt. There’s an empty can of Dr Pepper crumpled about a foot away, and he’s kicking up dust so that the can gets covered. He can feel the movement rubbing holes into his already worn-down sneakers, right where the big toe is, and suddenly he’s thinking about winter and about Ian graduating from ROTC. About Ian getting steel capped army boots and thick, sharp uniforms and then he’s thinking about himself, staying here and kicking cans in his scruffy shoes and hoodie. The one with unmoveable syrup stains and the ragged cuff from when Colin tried to hold Mickey’s hand over the gas hob but only ended up scorching his sleeve.

And, if he’s honest, it stings. It stings like _shit,_ because every summer since he was old enough to start “helping out” the family with their runs has felt like the last. And now this one does too, but for a different reason. He’s in no danger of dying like usual, but…if Ian goes, then maybe he is. Maybe he is, in a way. And that’s a truth he can barely even begin to think about.

He steps forward once, twice. There’s not much to say these days since they spend so much time joined at the hip, but there has to be something he can think of.

“Still think you’re wrong about before, man,” Mickey says, rehashing an old argument from three hours ago.

Ian rolls his eyes. “No, let’s say it _did_ happen,” he says. “Let’s say it did happen. What would you have done, realistically?”

They’d practically bolted out of the store when the cops got there. Linda had insisted on calling them the second she heard Ian and Mickey bitching about the crackhead in the fridge aisle who looked like he wanted to bring the place down, and when they arrived to restrain the man and search him for weapons Ian and Mickey had clocked out and ran. They weren’t entirely sure why. There was no real danger, but there was something to be said for the thrill of making excitement where there was none. Of being the innocent ones for once. And doing it together.

“But it didn’t! You saw the guy, he was fuckin’ out of it. Would’ve floored him if he tried anything. It’s all, I don’t know, hypothetical.”

“Fancy word.”

“Fuck you.”

And Ian’s smile is a warm, blazing thing. He looks like he _likes_ Mickey, and Mickey wants to believe it.

And because he would rather die than stop talking to Ian, Mickey humors him. “Fine. If it did happen, then we’d both be dead. Guy would have blown the place up with all those weird wires he had in his pocket.”

Ian looks up, thinking, and propels himself round on the roundabout he’s sat on that Mickey is pretty sure was built for babies.

“Then again, he could’ve just been looking for his favourite brand of chips. And just happened to have six thousand dollars’ worth of weapons stuffed in his trench coat pockets.”

“What do crackheads even eat, anyway?”

Ian shrugs. “I dunno. What do you eat?”

It takes Mickey a second to catch on, but when he does he makes a run for the spinning roundabout and jumps onto it, tackling Ian down. Their laughter sounds like the whoosh of a passing car, their knees knocking together, and after they’ve got a good couple of hits in and the conversation has derailed into a debate about the best flavour of chips, Mickey feels like a kid again.

There’s nothing about their relationship that’s strictly _wholesome_. Mickey knows that. It had been fucked from the start, literally. But there’s something here, something that lives deep in the veins of the ground where he and Ian walk, that makes Mickey feel like someone who’s meant to be seventeen years old. With Ian, Mickey can feel the childhood he lost creeping back in like the dawn of every longer day.

And sometimes it’s boring. Sometimes they sit for too long outside. There are stretches of time where Ian drinks his beer and Mickey drinks his beer and neither of them enjoy it, but they drink it anyway because it’s what life gave them. And the cheapness of it will start to fizz unpleasantly and thicken in the back of their throats, and Mickey will bitch about Gallagher slacking on his duties so they’ll spend the rest of the late afternoon hidden under the overpass. But once it’s over, once Mickey has gone home after trying desperately to hold in everything he wants to say, he lets himself think about how much he likes boredom. Round here, you can’t afford to be bored. You’re bored, and then before you know it your dad’s friends have kicked down your door at three in the morning demanding to look through your bedside drawer for spare crack that they never find. Mickey learned long ago that you can’t let that shit take you by surprise anymore.

With Ian by his side, rambling about some rando patriotic army shit and talking about – Mickey doesn't even know, fuckin' boots or something, for Christ's sake – it’s like how he imagines the very last moment before drowning to be. That tiny, shocking slip of euphoria, of pleasure, after the suffering and pain. He’s bored, and suddenly he can breathe. He doesn’t need to think. He doesn’t need to keep his finger on a real trigger while he’s trying to play guitar or drive cool cars on GTA just in case life rams down his door once again.

So one day, he does it.

Switches on the TV. Reads the magazines. Takes the fruit from his mother’s outstretched hand, says thank you even if she can’t meet his eye.

Only it’s not quite like that. He’s sat with Ian in the playground again, every nerve still alight with their most recent reunion. They’re talking about…something. _Something_. It doesn’t matter, because at this point they must know everything there is to know about each other’s lives. Every fucked-up thing their dads said, how bitchy their sisters can be. How they’re both middle children. And how that seems to mean something, even if it doesn’t.

Mickey shifts uncomfortably on the narrow swing seat. Ian turns to look at him, a shit-eating grin on his face.

“Shut up.”

“What?” Ian says, feigning nonchalance.

“No need to look so fuckin’ proud for making my ass hurt every other day.”

Mickey knows that look on Ian’s face. He’s about to make a very bad, very cheesy joke, and Mickey’s going to do nothing to stop him.

“Fine. No need to get so _butthurt.”_

“Fuck you,” Mickey says, shaking his head, as Ian laughs at himself. “You’re not funny.”

“Nah, I am.”

The laughter dies, and they look out at the sun. Some evenings it hangs lower over the backs of the houses they can see from their vantage point, painting the neighborhood in something like peace. Then a woman cackles from one side and there’s a gunshot from the other, and things are back to normal.

Mickey looks at his watch again. Ian sees.

“I do that too, you know.”

Mickey goes cold. He scoffs. “Do what?”

“Brace myself to go home.”

He’s right. He’s so right. “I already told you, that’s not what the fuck I’m doing, alright? I just – this fuckin’ watch, it…”

He trails off, picking at the sides of the clock face pathetically to add something to the mumbled “doesn’t fuckin’ fit right” that’s sitting in the corner of his mouth.

But Ian knows, because of course he does.

_I live inside you, and you live in me._

“It’s tiring, isn’t it.”

“Mm.”

There isn’t much more that needs to be said. Mickey grabs for the packet of sour gummy worms in Ian’s hand. Ian snatches it away, pulling it in a circle around his head, only conceding once Mickey has grabbed a hold of his wrist and is digging his nails in.

Ian lets him take a worm from the packet, and it’s only once Mickey has eaten it that he realises he never let go of Ian’s wrist.

And that his hand has slipped down a little further.

There’s instinct in his head that sounds like his father’s voice, telling him to pull away from the beast. In the second it takes him to fight it, Mickey’s mouth is dry. He whips his head around the park to check if anyone else is there, and his other hand is shaking in fear, but he fights and fights and _fights_ against the clamminess and finally lets his hand drop properly into Ian’s. He laces their fingers together, and something deep and childish inside Mickey whispers, _this is where it should have started._

Mickey’s never held a hand before. Not like this. Not in a way that grounds him. The sun sets a little further until it’s aligned with their faces, warming Mickey’s skin. He closes his eyes, and even though he still has no idea what the fuck he’s doing, he squeezes Ian’s hand tight.

“We don’t have to go home, you know,” Ian says, and it’s so quiet Mickey barely hears it. But he does hear it. And he hears everything Ian’s not saying, too.

_If we’re stuck here, we might as well be up against it together._

He wants to shake Ian for everything he saw last year. He’d been a kid when Kash had tried all that shit. A kid. Proud, scared, obnoxious, frustrating, loud and quiet at the same time. 

And then that must mean Mickey is a kid too, because all he wants is to hide his face in Ian and for Ian to hide his face in him and no one in the damn world has to see them.

Because he loves him. And, if he squints, if he pays attention to the gentle squeezes Ian gives his hand in return, he might start to believe that Ian loves him, too.

“If we’re not going home, then the fuck are you waiting for, Gallagher?” Mickey lets go, cold rushing back to his palm, and pushes Ian off the swing. “Show me fast you can run in those stupid-ass boots after two weeks of practice.”

So Ian runs, and when Mickey gets bored of watching he chases him. It doesn’t matter that the noises coming from what he’s almost certain is his house sound loud and violent. If he runs fast enough, then all he sees is a blur of Ian’s red head and the wind in his ears singing, _you’re seventeen._

There are things Mickey knows, but it’s all distant in the here and now. He knows it’ll be dark soon, he knows the clubs will open, he knows there’ll be pretty young homophobes looking out for a fight. He knows he’ll wake up tomorrow, no matter where he is, and there’ll be someone pulling their child out of his way in the street because they know his cursed fucking surname. He knows this hot, scary summer will end someday, and he’s never quite sure if he wants it to if the only true danger is the flash of Ian Gallagher’s smile in the dark, all curling smoke and glittering eyes.

But now, in the here and now that he and Ian have built with playfights and laughter and the intimacy they don’t dare articulate, it doesn’t matter. Because he’s seventeen, and with Ian Gallagher he’s allowed to be.


End file.
